History of the term "Social Networking"

I thought that social network would be an interesting word to look up because a lot of our daily activities include being online on social networks whether it is to chat with people or for other reasons. It plays a big role in how we communicate with each other in today’s information society. When looking up the work “social network,” I started my research with ProQuest. From ProQuest, a newspaper article was found from the New York Times. The time of the newspaper article was “Social Network Sites Seek Common Software Standard.” In this news article, Facebook of the United States and Bebo of United Kingdom were mentioned as the two country’s most popular social networking websites used by billions of people. When created, they originally called the social circle “OpenSocial.” It then later became the standard for all social networks. The purpose of the standards is to encourage people to use social networks more and more and also encourage developers to create more useful tools online and from there, opensocial turned into social networking. I thought that it was really interesting to know that the social networks are trying to set a standard to reach the same goals and how they planned to do it. Nothing came up when I typed it up in Chicago Tribune or Lost Angeles Times.

          Next, I search it up in Project Muse and JStor. For Project Muse, several examples of how social network should be like in society came up as a PDF file from books that were written. An example was in a book called Community Networks and Civic Engagement: A Social Network Approach by Andrea L. Kavanaugh; in this book, the author discusses the proper ways of socially connecting with others through face to face rather than through technology. Several of authors also argued how social networks should work.  Other examples talk about importance of Social networking in society. I am surprised by how many topics are out there just based on one term (Social networking) and how it came to be.

              The way that social networking is used today is still the same as it was back then. We still used online technology to communicate to each other just as they did back then. The only difference is that social network back then needed to push itself out there to be used and be discovered by users whereas today, we all know that it is already available for us. Even today, it still plays a very important part in our daily lives.